Raise the Hammer

(annoying 30 minute edit timer, despite error message of 90 minute edit timer; lost some text and Google Street View links as I was adding extra bullets...we need /either/ an autosave or permit 90 minute edit limit rather than a 30 minute edit limit...now resuming)

...continued...

.5. Peeking left instead, saw corner with stairs. Walked my bike. Stairs from Grange St to Young St

.6. In retrospect, I should have turned left onto Grove St from Liberty. Grove St, parallel street 1 block south of Hunter St but there were no bike markings and I wasn't sure where it led to.

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Solution:

A) Extend Hunter St bike lane 1-2 block eastwards to Wellington St S Hunter St, at Wellington

B) Protected bike lane for 1.5 blocks southwards to Stinson Street Unprotected Wellington St, not inviting for bikes

C) Upgrade the sharrows on Stinson Ave at Wellington St until it reconnects to the Stinson painted bike lane two blocks eastwards.

Until then, it's a very, very,. very confusing eastwards bike commute from Hamilton Downtown GO. Once you're on Stinson, there's now many routes (South of King) to safely commute to all residential areas all the way to Gage Park.

By fixing a mere 3.5 blocks of bike path gap, we greatly upgrade the bikeability of the Hunter-Stinson-Delaware bike corridor towards the Gage Park area (Which shows up very hotly on the aggregated SoBi GPS bike route heatmap, too), by fixing the bike lane gap between Hunter and Stinson. Contentious storefront parking is not involved here, and the residential parking is always very light; the homeowners can always park on the opposite side of the street or on a side street, now that bike traffic has increased (thanks to SoBi) that the bike is the more valuable greater good than lightly-used residential streetside parking.

We only need cheap paint for this. This is a much, much, much lower lying apple than installing protected bike lanes (at a high enough quality to meet Locke St standards -- it deserves full Cannon-style treatment at the minimum) when bike traffic has reached high enough levels to bring more Locke business than cars. It's almost there, or finally arrived there already, but let's focus on lower lying apples first, and make sure the Locke BIA is onboard, and businesses work with us.

That takes time, but the broken Hunter-Stinson bike connection is something that can be fixed in one weekend of reparations work. It may require eliminating one streetside parking on Wentworth (for only 1.5 blocks!) but more bikes pass those 10 Wellington streetside parking spots than cars park in those spots, and now it's a greater public good to reallocate that road surface to a protected 2-way bike lane (Cannon-syle) for just a mere 1.5 blocks to safely connect Hunter and Stinson.

Therefore, let's fix easy gaps like these during August 2015 -- 3.5 blocks of missing connection between Hunter bike lanes and Stinson bike lanes!

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-07-29 13:25:27